This blog post is my contribution to the OTN Appreciation Day, the brain child of Tim Hall (read his blog post here).

For my contribution, I’m going to write about something that is a bit different to what most people will be writing about. Most people will be writing about some feature of the Oracle Database or maybe their favourite tool.

I’m not going to do that. What I’m going to write about is something that OTN does for use Developers, DBAs, etc.

Basically OTN has done so much over the years to help developers in a multitude of different ways.

Apart from the support that OTN gives me as an Oracle ACE Director (Thank you!), one of my favourite things that OTN makes available to us are the VirtualBox Pre-built Developer VMs.

These pre-built VMs allow us developers to go play with the technology, to learn how to use it, to follow tutorials, to see how various software applications work together, etc all within a virtual machine.

I bet that (almost) everyone reading this blog and taking part in the OTN Appreciation Day will have used one or more of the virtual box prebuilt VMs.

Why is this a good thing? How would you like trying to install all this software from scratch? Not me. Typically for me when performing an install I usually mess something up. If this happens often enough then you may just get frustrated with what you are trying to do and just give up on it. The result will probably be you giving a negative review to your employer.

But the pre-build VMs take the pain of installing (sometimes) large and complex software is taken away from you and allows you to dive straight into using the software. I also really love that the VMs come with tutorials, decent data sets, example applications built using the software, and demonstrations on how to get each of these working together.

If you mess anything up, then you can just re-import the VM and start all over again. When you are finished using the VM and testing the software, all you need to do is to delete the VM. You latop, desktop or where ever you have installed the VM is left clean with no partially uninstalled files, etc.

Each of us will have our favourite VMs. For most people the Developer Day VM is fantastic. It you are a beginner or an experienced developer I would bet most people will have a copy of this VM and are probably using it as their personal Oracle Database sever.

For OTN Appreciation day, I haven’t talked about a Database feature. Instead I’ve talked about something that OTN has done for us, the developer, DBA, etc community. I’d like to thank OTN for supporting the community by providing these VirtualBox pre-built VMs for us to use. You have saved me/us many, many, many hours/days/weeks/months over the years.